Chowdhury’s parents recognized their daughter’s talent at an early age and nurtured it carefully. When she was two years old, her father took her to the Hugli River for her first swimming lesson. At age five she was admitted to a swimming-training school.

In her first national competition, at age nine, she dominated her age group by winning six gold medals in six events. She continued to improve, winning various junior and national championships, as well as six gold medals at the 1991 South Asian Federation Games.

Chowdhury started long-distance swimming in 1989 and crossed the English Channel that year. She won the 81-km (50-mile) Murshidabad Long Distance Swim in 1996, and in 1999 she crossed the English Channel again. In 2005 she became the first woman to have swum across sea channels off five continents—including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Tyrrhenian Sea, Cook Strait, Toroneos Gulf (Gulf of Kassándra) in Greece, the Catalina Channel off the California coast, and from Three Anchor Bay to Robben Island near Cape Town, South Africa).

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